The Big Imagination art project brought a real Boeing 747 – and a disco party - to Burning Man in 2016.

I’ve never associated the Burning Man community and arts festival with news sites. I didn’t come to my current job expecting that a group of volunteers who built a jumbo jet disco camp in the desert would be natural subjects for a study about membership models for supporting journalism. Yet the field badly needs to enlist expertise and diverse contributions, so I commissioned a researcher to help our Membership Puzzle Project at New York University so we could look at less obvious fields including open-source software, faith-based groups, alternative currencies, eco-communities and communes.

At the project, where I lead research into sustainable business models for journalism, I encourage design and audience development teams to seek research subjects and experimental areas that can initially seem out of reach. Studying the needs of “extreme users” – those who might comprise a cause or organisation’s most loyal 1-10% – can help us develop insights and designs that better serve 90-99% of other prospective users.

Members of the Big Imagination art group brought a Boeing 747 aircraft – and an accompanying disco party – to Burning Man in 2016. The effort to bring a plane to the dry-lake playa required thousands of hours with volunteer members. Some people spent a week at a rented house in the Mojave desert in the summer months preceding the festival for hands-on work. They gutted, reconstructed, extended, and reinforced the plane, then refurbished the cockpit and installed new staircases. They moved the wings, landing gear, and upper half 500 miles to Black Rock City, the location of Burning Man, where they bolted the rest of the plane together. For our research team at Membership Puzzle, it served as a highly visual example of collaboration on a shared endeavour, with people of varying levels of expertise in different areas.

We can learn a great deal more from these highly committed people than we can from those who engage in activities more casually. I believe that we can come away with more that’s useful to us, and faster, from studying members of a kibbutz who live, work, and prosper or fail financially together than those at a co-op grocery store who may participate a few hours a month and with less at stake. I don’t have anything against the latter’s method of food shopping: I just want our team to start with the most provocative examples to best shake up our thinking. This led us to interview a member of the Israeli kibbutz Mishmar Ha’emek on the topics of trust, privacy, and inclusion, even when it would have been simpler for us to talk to nearby members of the famed Park Slope Food Co-op.

Members of Ecobairros, a community-led volunteer group in São Paulo, Brazil, joined forces to revitalise neighbourhood springs during the city’s worst water crisis in decades. Photograph: Werther/Estadao Conteudo

What does this look like in practice? At the Membership Puzzle Project, we regularly interview people who support independent news organisations with their time, expertise, ideas, and money. With our director, Jay Rosen, we’re delving into research on ways that journalism organisations are diversifying their revenues, with a particular focus on membership programmes and optimising news for trust. The Guardian is among the sites we study, and we partner with the Dutch news publisher De Correspondent, who use members’ own skills and knowledge to enhance their product.

Some contributors, many of whom have never worked in a newsroom, act as volunteer comment moderators and fact-checkers. Most commonly, their contributions are in the form of a financial donation to a news site, which is highly valuable as advertising revenue declines and the costs of reporting news rise. Yet we’re increasingly compelled to learn about those who can give not financially, but in their time.

One thing we hear frequently is that no matter what they can offer, supporters want to experience an authentic sense of belonging in the organisations they support. Given this insight, our team of researchers and I have been learning what it means to live and work in community with others whose values are aligned with ours (note: this doesn’t just mean “people like me”). We’re filling in gaps in our understanding about what “community” actually means in practice. We do this by interviewing and observing people who take part in activities completely: that is to say, they practice with others daily, are deeply passionate about what they affiliate themselves with, and perhaps use their involvement to earn their livelihoods.

These areas were the focus of our study into why members join movements, how they contribute, and how membership-driven organisations scale their efforts. Image by Leon Postma. Photograph: Leon Postma

Recently we’ve been investigating what the news industry can learn from other member-driven movements. Journalism’s traditional financial models are dying. We’re asking: could churches, environmental movements, and open-source communities hold clues to its survival? As Zeynep Tufekci argued in a different context in the New York Times, it pays to “develop respect for hard-earned expertise in areas other than our own” if we want to improve our industry. So that’s what we did.

Over six months researchers including Laura Ballay, JP Gomes, Corinne Osnos, Daniel Stringer, Cherie Hu, Matt Thompson, and Gonzalo del Peon interviewed dozens of leaders and members in organisations around the world, with an emphasis on member motivation, participation, and scale. The question for our team was: what clues might we glean from other membership veterans and pioneers? How are they tackling their own challenges? And how might news organisations emulate some of those techniques, be inspired by their thinking, or learn from their examples?

We found that membership models are fundamentally different from subscription or product models – and that they require whole new methods to be successful. Membership isn’t just “subscription by another name”, though it’s often referred to that way, or about giving consumers access to a product. It’s participation in a larger cause that reflects what people want to see in civil society. In membership, there’s a different social contract or value proposition between the site and its members. At the basic level of “What do you give? What do you get?”, subscribers pay their money and get access to a product. But members join the cause and participate because they believe in it and want to help effect change.

Emily Gologoski is research director at The Membership Puzzle Project. Visit membership puzzle.org for more.